_ In the bureau de change there was a little knot of English,
people, with naive, romantic, and honest faces, quite different
from the faces outside in the street. No corruption in those
faces, but a sort of wondering and infantile sincerity, rather out
of its element and lost in a land too unsophisticated, seeming to
belong to an earlier age! Sophia liked their tourist stare, and
their plain and ugly clothes. She longed to be back in England,
longed for a moment with violence, drowning in that desire.
The English clerk behind his brass bars took her notes, and
carefully examined them one by one. She watched him, not entirely
convinced of his reality, and thought vaguely of the detestable
morning when she had abstracted the notes from Gerald's pocket.
She was filled with pity for the simple, ignorant Sophia of those
days, the Sophia who still had a few ridiculous illusions
concerning Gerald's character. Often, since, she had been tempted
to break into the money, but she had always withstood the
temptation, saying to herself that an hour of more urgent need
would come. It had come. She was proud of her firmness, of the
force of will which had enabled her to reserve the fund intact.
The clerk gave her a keen look, and then asked her how she would
take the French money. And she saw the notes failing down one
after another on to the counter as the clerk separated them with a
snapping sound of the paper.
Chirac was beside her.
"Does that make the count?" she said, having pushed towards him
five hundred-franc notes.
"I should not know how to thank you," he said, accepting the
notes. "Truly--"
His joy was unmistakably eager. He had had a shock and a fright,
and he now saw the danger past. He could return to the cashier of
his newspaper, and fling down the money with a lordly and careless
air, as if to say: "When it is a question of these English, one
can always be sure!" But first he would escort her to the hotel.
She declined--she did not know why, for he was her sole point of
moral support in all France. He insisted. She yielded. So she
turned her back, with regret, on that little English oasis in the
Sahara of Paris, and staggered to the fiacre.
And now that she had done what she had to do, she lost control of
her body, and reclined flaccid and inert. Chirac was evidently
alarmed. He did not speak, but glanced at her from time to time
with eyes full of fear. The carriage appeared to her to be
swimming amid waves over great depths. Then she was aware of a
heavy weight against her shoulder; she had slipped down upon
Chirac, unconscious. _